


“Don’t Really Like How It Ends”

by thatsrightdollface



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Angst, Gen, I'm very sorry, SPOILERS for the movie!!!! please be warned, Spoilers, the major character death is Pink Diamond :P
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-05
Updated: 2019-09-05
Packaged: 2020-10-10 13:50:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20529065
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsrightdollface/pseuds/thatsrightdollface
Summary: Spinel can’t help but imagine other ways this whole thing could’ve wound up, as the changes come for her.





	“Don’t Really Like How It Ends”

**Author's Note:**

> Hi there! I hope you enjoy this if you read it~ I... have a lot of feelings about Spinel...... and I’m sorry for anything I might’ve gotten wrong/weird, here. :’) I wanted to write a thing for her as soon as I could!!! And I kept thinking “she’s so strong. Rose completely missed out, not having her in her army!” while watching the movie, so I guess that’s part of why this happened the way it did. 
> 
> Thank you. Please, have a nice day. :D
> 
> (I’m... gonna write something happy for Spinel, if I can, I think...... @_@)

It was hard not to think about it: what things might have been like, if Spinel’s Best Friend... the Gem she had been pulled out of Homeworld for, fresh and new and ready to play... had bothered to come back for her. There in the garden, with bits of root still clinging stubbornly to her feet, with dust worked into the folds of her familiar outfit and along the back of her knees. Like a doll left way high up on a shelf too long, wasn’t she? Spinel thought about it, there at the foot of that flickering screen, tasting tears for the very first time.

She could have been useful, right? Even if the game Pink Diamond wanted to play was a messy one. Even if she was after a whole gosh-darn revolution! Spinel coulda learned new tricks for her — she would’ve wanted to help. She had _always_ wanted to... You know. To help. To play, yeah, but to _help_, right? At the end of things. At the sweet candy-glowing heart of her world.

Spinel had been made for dizzy laughter, for games and pranks and amusing stories whispered long into the night, long enough for Pink Diamond to forget whatever was messing with her and feel safe again. They could have slumber parties all the time, way back when; Spinel knew all the things that would keep her Best Friend smiling. Really, Spinel’s design had never completely _accommodated_ for tasting tears, she didn’t think. They were funny in her mouth, and the change crept through her in a poisonous ache. Hurt like burning rivers under her skin. A crooked upside-down heart. A new self, for the first time in all her thousands of years.

Spinel wrapped her stretched-out gummy arms around and around herself, holding tightly as she shook. The change came next, even as Spinel imagined seeing Earth at Pink Diamond’s side. Scraping dirt off her shoes; asking if she’d won the game they’d been playing, though to be honest she had never completely understood it. And then they’d... Spinel didn’t know. It seemed like Pink had loved the organic life on Earth, huh? Maybe she would’ve wanted to introduce her Best Friend. For thousands of years, Spinel had imagined playing tag through the alien trees, once her Best Friend came home; she had imagined splashing Pink Diamond with strange otherworldly ocean water, or making up new adventure stories together, to go with all Earth’s stars.

But hey. As those dreams faded — as Spinel tasted tears — new dreams trickled to the surface in their place. Those poison rivers under the skin, remember. Spinel could have called _“Ready or not! Here I come!”_ playing hide-and-seek... But she coulda done it on the battlefield too, probably, slippery and stretchy and helping her Best Friend out. Right? She could’ve come from everywhere, a blur of elastic and giggling blades. If she’d had to. If she’d been given a chance to try, for all the good things her Best Friend had ever stood for. Had Pink Diamond really thought Spinel would side against her? Honestly? No. No that couldn’t have been it.

Then why?

Spinel heard about Pink Diamond’s trusted army — the _other friends_ she kept at her side through it all, confided in and protected beneath her very own shield — and she imagined herself among them. Cracking a joke to make her war-weary commander/Best Friend smile, glimpsing just a little hope through the pain. Slithering unseen through too-narrow places past enemy lines, maybe even poofing all kindsa unsuspecting fools before they even knew what hit ‘em. If she _had_ to, of course.

“Wanna hear a joke? Knock, knock!” Spinel could have said, before crunching some soldiers’ heads together.

“Simon says _don’t_ stab yourself with your own little sword! Aw, no — ya did it anyway! Poof!” Something like that.

Spinel could have had some of the most appropriate one-liners in the whole army, if she did say so herself. And she would’ve been loyal, and she would’ve been brave, and _hadn’t she only ever wanted to be a friend?_ She could imagine Pink Diamond giving everybody rousing speeches about truth and change and becoming their own selves, about being _their own people_... Like supposedly she’d been teaching everybody how to be... But then how come Spinel hadn’t gotten a choice, hm?

How come she hadn’t been a Real Friend, a _person_ worth coming back for? If everybody on Earth was so shiny and special, how come she’d become a remnant of the past or whatever like this, and hadn’t even gotten asked whether she wanted to play the same game for thousands of years without ever getting to take a sit-down break?

Honestly, it made sense Pink Diamond would have been able to shake all those other Gems awake. Make them feel like they mattered. She was a cool breeze on a Gem’s face, even once the garden went shivery and haunted, shifting in front of Spinel’s face like a reflection in a funhouse mirror. As the centuries passed. Pink Diamond was the brightest of those far off untouchable stars; she was inspiration for the very proudest pratfalls, the wittiest riddles. She was everything.

She had been everything. 

Spinel plotted an attack on Earth, now. The plotting bubbled up inside her in toxic hateful burning rivers, and you know what? She thought she might just inject rivers like that into Earth’s own skin, soon as she could. They’d match the burning she felt, in the end, as Pink Diamond’s weirdo organic son shriveled up dead. It fit together sorta pretty, didn’t it?

But no. Even as she was learning her own fighting style — even as she was twirling that Rejuvenator scythe, pacing back and forth as space shot by and she played Pink’s son’s message to the universe on a soul-boiling loop — part of Spinel was thinking about how she could have used those same battle strategies by Pink’s own side. Maybe not _exactly_ the same way. She wouldn’t have become so twisted, then, that’s for dang sure. She wouldn’t have caught a glimpse of her own reflection in the glinting glass of the injector and winced away. But maybe it could’ve been a little like this, or... Or probably something better. Pink came up with some of the best punchlines all on her own, after all, back in the garden! Growing up into whatever self she would’ve been with Pink mighta led to something better than Spinel could even imagine.

There was no telling what Spinel would have become, if she’d changed a different way, without the taste of tears in her mouth. She would never know now, would she, whatever other ways this story could have ended. A story where she went back to Homeworld by herself, maybe, but at least with an honest goodbye from the beginning. A story where she joined Pink Diamond’s army on Earth. A story where there was never a mysterious war at all. Spinel could imagine and imagine, but her heart had already creaked around upside-down.

The story was written. Too late for rewrites, but not too late for a little healthy criticism.


End file.
